Slack partners with Google to bring users a suite of deep integrations

Slack has partnered with Google to bring users more integrated offerings. There are millions of Google Drive documents shared on Slack by professional teams every month, and Slack intends that its users to be able to do more with Google services within Slack. There are a number of planned updates for integration with Google Drive, Google Cloud and Google Docs. Google Drive is building a bot that can be used from within Slack. Comments on Slides, Docs and Sheets can get lost beneath a pile of emails, now these comments can be settled, approved or rejected from within Slack itself, with notifications appearing in the Slack channel. Requests for access are also planned to be integrated, with a button for granting or denying access. Google Docs can be opened from within Slack to handle the comments. If you share a file on a Slack channel, and everyone in that channel does not have permission to access it, then Slack will prompt you to give those permissions first. This takes care of the irritating problem of sharing files in a Slack channel, only to find out later that users cannot access the document. Team Drives is a feature for professional groups that allows users to save common content in one place. A Slack channel can now be integrated with a Team Drive. Content posted to the Slack channel will automatically be saved on the Team Drive, and content uploaded to the Team Drive will automatically be shared on Slack. There is also an option to use Team Drive as the main repository of all content posted on Slack. The G Suite admin console will now allow system administrators to provision Slack for the entire company. New and existing teams on Slack support this function. The feature is useful for large organisations, as it reduces potential for user error. A planned feature is the availability to preview files shared on Slack, without having to open it. Such a feature is planned for Google Drive, which will allow users to glance at the content within the document. The integrations are scheduled to be rolled out in the first half of 2017.